Till Sickness Comes

When my home town of Macon, Georgia was announced as the next in line for evacuation, I couldn't believe it. My little bubble of blissfully ignorant safety was gone, burst wide open by a giant hypodermic needle.

It had finally reached us.

The whole thing had started as just another media scare that no one really took seriously. There was no way it was as bad as it was being made out to be, right? I certainly hadn't paid much attention to the news—just what was posted in the form of memes on the internet.

School held assemblies on it, which I generally zoned out of in favor of sneaking peeks at my phone or gossiping with my friends. They were supposed to tell us how to avoid catching and spreading.

What had they called it . . .

Right. The Novel Lyssavirus. NLV for short.

They sent home pamphlets with us, ones that we were to keep and a set that had to be signed by our parents to make sure they had been read.

When my mom had busted into my room without knocking early in the evening—an entirely unprecedented event as my parents did their best to respect my privacy even with a "no locked doors" policy—and announced we were leaving, I had scrambled to find those damn pamphlets and read what I had missed.

The only information on them was a set of symptoms to watch out for in yourself and other people. They were incredibly mundane at first, but the symptoms in the later stages were . . . alarming. To say the least.

Fever and confusion, disorientation.

A fear or aversion to sunlight.

Trouble sleeping.

Increased heart rate.

Excessive salivating.

Increased appetite and aversion to water.

In the final stages of the virus, when it had finished traveling through the nervous system to the brain, victims became agitated and prone to outbursts of extreme rage and violence.

I checked the internet: all the memes had been about rabies and some old movie called Cujo. Now I knew why.

Because it actually was rabies.

From what I could gather after watching some online videos was that a new inoculation had been created in an attempt to eradicate rabies from the local wildlife populations of our parks. Georgia had three highest rates of infection of all the States, so it had definitely been a good idea at the time.

It was a killer, after all; mostly transmitted by being bitten. Bats and raccoons were some of the worst offenders.

Clinical trials for the inoculation (to be distributed as an inhalant dusted over the parks) had reportedly gone well. Apparently, though, after releasing the vaccine into the real world—outside of the carefully monitored and sterile environment of a lab—things hadn't gone so smoothly.

The virus had mutated over the months following initial distribution. It adapted. Changed. The new vaccine didn't work anymore and the old one was useless, as well.

This new virus, this Novel Lyssavirus, was so much different. So much worse. The incubation time was shorter: it took a couple of hours to a couple of days now instead of several days or months—particularly in humans.

There was good news, at least, if I could call it that. The mutation caused by the vaccine kept the NLV from being fatal in most cases. Anyone who died to it was either young, old, or had compromised immune systems. There were still plenty of casualties to the virus, but the majority of them were from those infected by it.

The violent aggression it caused was making patients actively seek out victims. Bats swarmed, raccoons invaded, dogs turned on their masters, and people attacked their own family.

Mom slammed my bedroom door open again, interrupting my research and startling the hell out of me. My hands were shaking as I scrolled through articles on my phone.

"Why aren't you packing?" she demanded.

"I was reading the news . . . did you know all of this already?"

"Finish packing so we can leave! We'll miss the bus going to Florida." She pointedly ignored my question and left. Down the hall, I could hear Dad trying to sooth my little sister.

He was trying to explain to her why we had to leave all her Christmas presents behind. How do you even begin to make a six-year-old understand that?

I watched my open doorway for a chunk of time, then picked another breakdown video to listen to while I did what I was told and fit anything I could into one backpack. Over my Bluetooth speakers, the narrator droned on.

All of this increased aggression seemed to be the NLV's desperate attempt to further spread itself. In some cases, though, they would go too far in their violence and straight up kill whoever they were attacking. An imperfect system if I'd ever heard of one.

They didn't attack each other, though—just those not infected by the virus, and with the vaccines not working . . . There was no way to stop the infected patients short of putting them down Old Yeller style (there were so many memes about these old movies, making them suddenly relevant again).

I hadn't yet seen someone infected up close, just some off in the distance of amateur videos taken by normal people. They didn't seem human anymore.

More like . . . beasts.

I didn't want to leave, though I knew we had to. It hadn't seemed real to me even when the school had closed. Even when my parents had shut down their restaurant and arranged a living situation with my maternal aunt down in Florida.

It still didn't quite seem real—like it wasn't really happening to me.

After everything I'd just researched in this short time . . . I wasn't going to argue anymore despite any lingering bitter feelings.

How was I supposed to put my entire life in one backpack? Leave all my friends? What was even the concern in the first place? All we had to do was quarantine the infected and avoid getting bitten. Those thoughts and more danced around in my head as I picked out some clothes, my medication, and anything else I could fit that I couldn't bear to part with.

The rest of my belongings would still be there waiting for me by the time this all blew over, anyway. I had to believe that.